No Charity for Critical Pedagogy
Why I have no sympathy for Critical Social Justice Perspectives
To state it up front, my perspective won’t be sympathetic or even neutral towards Critical Pedagogy. I view it as something that has completely infected American education so that it may slowly destroy the standards and values of the field to replace them with those of Critical Social Justice. This piece will explain why that is my starting point and why it’s a reasonable place to begin.
Many teachers find the following quote by Margaret Mead to be something to strive for in their work:
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.1
I was certainly no exception. To teach children what to think is nothing more than indoctrination, and that is absolutely the wrong way to approach education. Instead, children must be taught how to use their minds such that they are able to make sense of the world even when they encounter novel situations that weren’t covered in the classroom. I still believe this is true, but what I didn’t realize is that it’s possible to teach children how to think about things ineffectively. It’s possible for education to give children a framework for how to deal with new situations, but in a way that twists and contorts everything into some form of oppression, some dynamic of power, or something that is just “problematic.” This is what I believe the goal of Critical Pedagogy is, and it has had great success in implementing this goal in our educational establishment.
As an example, today we hear stories of young employees who accuse their more experienced colleagues of “gatekeeping” when they are told to improve their skills before seeking positions of greater responsibility. Rather than work to get better at what they do, their inclination is to complain about how unfair the so-called gatekeepers are until someone higher up, someone who probably doesn’t want to risk being labeled “oppressor,” submits and gives the complainer what they want. It’s not that this kind of employee had the conclusion “my supervisors are always just trying to keep me down” stuffed into their head. The problem is more subtle and more serious because this person’s method of analyzing the world only involves searching for (and inevitably finding) oppression.
This is what I mean by the idea that a person can be taught how to think ineffectively (rather than simply being taught what to think). A person who is conditioned to see oppression everywhere may display great adaptivity and creativity for where and how they find oppression, something that someone who has merely been indoctrinated with a list of slogans is probably unable to do. More simply, it’s the difference between telling a child that, “all white people are racist,” and giving them the challenge to “find the ways in which the racism of white people manifests in any particular situation.” One merely stops thought altogether (bad enough), but the other twists an active mind towards an end that can only be destructive.
While I’m sure to encounter more of these types of situations during my analysis, I’ve seen and heard of enough of these instances to believe it’s a serious problem. A problem that originates with Critical Pedagogy. As such, when interpreting their ideas, I will be operating under the premise that their ultimate goal is to install a filter in a child’s mind that makes them see only shades of oppression. I will be interpreting the writings of these “educators” with the knowledge that their final objective is exceedingly harmful. This means I won’t be charitable, which bothers me a bit. I do think it’s important to try to put the best possible interpretation on new ideas. However, I’ve recently been convinced that I shouldn’t extend this courtesy to the ideas put forward by those coming from the Critical Social Justice perspective.
In his book Counter Wokecraft, Charles Pincourt points out that one of the tactics of the Critical Social Justice movement is to demand charity, but never extend it.2 This resonated quite bit when I applied it to what I knew of The 1619 Project.3
By all accounts, this project was quite a revolutionary thesis because it recontextualized American history such that slavery and the preservation of slavery were presented the essential institution and operating principle of the American nation. Needless to say, this is a claim that would require irrefutable evidence—evidence, that was, according to many of its critics, sorely lacking in the actual scholarship of the project. Nevertheless, advocates were undeterred, accusing critics of wanting to ignore the history of slavery in America as part of a desire to maintain “white supremacy in America” or some other such nonsense.
What I saw in this response was both an implied demand for charity in their critics’ interpretation of the work, and an explicit refusal to give such charity in their response to criticism. The demand for charity comes with the implication that The 1619 Project should be seen as merely wanting a complete history of the United States of America, warts and all. Critics pointed to factual inaccuracies, wide omissions of relevant context, and a poorly-researched character assassination of one of America’s greatest leaders. Despite all of this, we were expected to give The 1619 Project a pass in order to be charitable in our interpretation. Even charity only extends so far.
On the other hand, the characterization of their critics not only offers no charity, but also a stunning lack of originality in how predictable it was. Critics were accused of wanting to whitewash history, as if only by accepting The 1619 Project’s ahistorical, anti-capitalist narrative could you accept that slavery was horrible institution and a stain on America’s past. This twisting of logic and fairness is despicable, and yet is only one of many instances from the Critical Social Justice movement.
Not only do I think the content of Critical Pedagogy engages in this same double standard when it comes to interpretational charity, I believe it produces thinkers who believe this double standard is the proper way to engage with ideas. For this reason, I won’t be assuming the best of intentions as I engage in analyzing the works of Critical Pedagogy.
Image Credit: (Internet Archive Book Images, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Margaret_Mead,_AMNH.jpg)
Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation. New York: Blue Ribbon Books, 1928.
Pincourt, Charles, and James Lindsay. Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond. Independently published, 2021.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html